Overcoming the Barrier of Traditional Accounting in Lean Environments

Manufacturers of all sizes are more efficient, better managed, and more profitable because of lean—yet this improvement has plateaued at many companies. What’s holding up the progress of lean? The real problem is that as lean evolves and spreads beyond the plant floor, its conflict with traditional accounting is escalating—and becoming more dangerous to the financial health of manufacturers.

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Lean delivers what companies need in today's competitive world: shorter lead times, improved quality, reduced cost, increased profit, improved productivity, and better customer service. Lean advocates have come to recognize that enterprise resource planning and lean work well together: the five lean principles are supported and enhanced by the information control and management tools delivered by end-to-end enterprise software suites. Read More

More and more, it seems that traditional performance management is not enough, with more factors and interrelationships for companies to consider than ever before, and multi-platform, multi-tier business-critical applications that span physical, virtual, and hybrid cloud environments. Read this white paper to learn about a new way to consider performance management, so you can effectively react to today's challenges and proactively meet the business service needs of tomorrow. Read More

Be it personal customer details or confidential internal analytic information, ensuring the protection of your organization’s sensitive data inside and outside of production environments is crucial. Multiple copies of data and constant transmission of sensitive information stream back and forth across your organization. As information shifts between software development, testing, analysis, and reporting departments, a large "surface area of risk" is created. This area of risk increases even more when sensitive information is sent into public or hybrid clouds. Traditional data masking methods protect information, but don’t have the capability to respond to different application updates. Traditional masking also affects analysis as sensitive data isn’t usually used in these processes. This means that analytics are often performed with artificially generated data, which can yield inaccurate results.

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You know the statistics—lean can shorten your lead times, reduce inventories, cut operating costs, free up resources, and more. But countless surveys have confirmed that most lean initiatives fail to deliver expected and needed results. Why? Are successes confined to a restricted list of industry sectors? Are only "lean experts" capable of leading an organization through a successful implementation? Read More

Small and medium businesses (SMB) need to address inventory challenges by using a tightly integrated approach that reflects the dynamics of the extended supply chain. Data must also be available to other application modules within the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. An inventory optimization solution allows companies to effectively fulfill demand and identify how to gain additional profits from their inventories. Read More

By seeing a business as a "value system" for customers, companies can shift lean strategic priorities towards growth-oriented targets instead of cost-cutting. Instead of squeezing additional margins to boost the bottom line, lean philosophy can increase demand response and sales, while maintaining and lowering cost per unit—thus enabling lower prices, a competitive edge, and more business. Read More